Re: I've been out of FIRST for a while and decided I want to mentor again.
 

(First of all, it is great to see you here on the CD boards, Michael. Please let me know if you need any help along the way with helping these Ohio FRC teams.)

With regard to the DAQ system you are using, what is it? The good folks at NI just sent us this myDAQ unit from NI. We have not kicked the tires yet, but it seems pretty simple. We're trying to see how it could be used to help with FRC robots.

Andy

Re: I've been out of FIRST for a while and decided I want to mentor again.
 

We actually have about 2,000 teams or so. A lot of teams drop out.

Re: I've been out of FIRST for a while and decided I want to mentor again.
 

Another great thing Michael is that FRC is now getting teams from all over the world. Brazil, Israel, you name it. In fact, my own team, 1676 the Pascack Pioneers, is helping to start a team all the way in China.

Welcome back Michael!

Re: I've been out of FIRST for a while and decided I want to mentor again.
 

Good to see you're doing well Michael, we had some fun times back on 1646. They actually built, in my opinion, their most well-designed machine this past year, and won the industrial design award for it at the Boilermaker Regional for it.

2009 Robot
2008 Robot Proving that yes, it's possible to lose a regional when you're paired up with 27 and 469. Michigan is just that good.

Good luck with your new team!

Re: I've been out of FIRST for a while and decided I want to mentor again.
 

Can't tell if you are joking?


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MATLAB#History

Cleve Moler, the chairman of the computer-science department at the University of New Mexico, started developing MATLAB in the late 1970s.[3] He designed it to give his students access to LINPACK and EISPACK without their having to learn Fortran. It soon spread to other universities and found a strong audience within the applied mathematics community. Jack Little, an engineer, was exposed to it during a visit Moler made to Stanford University in 1983. Recognizing its commercial potential, he joined with Moler and Steve Bangert. They rewrote MATLAB in C and founded MathWorks in 1984 to continue its development.


http://web.archive.org/web/200504200.../birthday.html

Java technology was created as a programming tool in a small, closed-door project initiated by Patrick Naughton, Mike Sheridan, and James Gosling of Sun in 1991. On May 23, 1995, John Gage, director of the Science Office for Sun Microsystems, and Marc Andreessen, cofounder and executive vice president at Netscape, stepped onto a stage and announced to the SunWorldTM audience that JavaTM technology was real, it was official, and it was going to be incorporated into Netscape NavigatorTM, the world's portal to the Internet.

Re: I've been out of FIRST for a while and decided I want to mentor again.
 

Will do.

Here's a PowerPoint presentation that outlines the DAQ system that I designed:

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=WVCV4WEV (wait until the countdown timer gets to 0 and click "Regular Download")

It turns out there were some issues that NI engineers didn't know about with having a "Timing Chassis". They didn't bother to tell us you couldn't have more than one timing card in the chassis, so it had to be reconfigured a bit, but that PowerPoint should give a decent idea of the system. What was eventually done was having a 1U blade server with a fiber-optic card for each chassis. All of the chasses were networked together and all data could be accessed from a main "host" computer running Linux.

Re: I've been out of FIRST for a while and decided I want to mentor again.
 

MATLAB is now programmed in Java. Some of the internal workings of MATLAB is dependent on how Java works, and if I recall, you can actually access Java libraries from within MATLAB.

Re: I've been out of FIRST for a while and decided I want to mentor again.
 

Modern MATLAB has a lot of Java in it. Under the hood, there's FORTRAN (LAPACK), C (FFTW), and who knows what else. But the core application itself (including GUI) now runs on a JRE.

Re: I've been out of FIRST for a while and decided I want to mentor again.
 

Yes, I know.

The word "offshoot" threw me off.

Re: I've been out of FIRST for a while and decided I want to mentor again.
 

Nope, the idea was pretty much shot down by 461. I personally agree, i don't feel as inspired, or happy, for that matter, if 3 teams work together to make one robot. but thats just me

I know. If you would have read my post, you would've seen that i said "There are now over 2000 current teams and over 4000 team numbers!!!" I do realize that there are not 4,000 current teams, as shown in my previous post.

Re: I've been out of FIRST for a while and decided I want to mentor again.
 

I guess since bumpers are now a requirement, right now wouldn't be a bad time to buy pool noodles, considering how difficult they'll be to come by in the winter. ;)

Re: I've been out of FIRST for a while and decided I want to mentor again.
 

Bill Miller, the Director of FRC, encourages teams to buy pool noodles every year during summer.

(That's another change--Bill's Blog is an official communications channel (except for rules questions, where nothing is official except updates and Q&A).)

Re: I've been out of FIRST for a while and decided I want to mentor again.
 

Here it is: